


Radioactive

by sixchord



Series: Crossroads [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cora is a badass, Gen, Hale Family Feels, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-31
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-25 05:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/949413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixchord/pseuds/sixchord
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dear dumbass,<br/>You have been asleep for 18 hours and I got tired of watching you/watching TV/buying shit from the vending machine so I have gone for a run.  If I’m not back by 3:00 PM and you are awake, you should probably call me because I might be dead.  Just kidding, but maybe consider calling me just in case.  You picked a really shitty neighborhood to stay over in.<br/>Love,<br/>C</p>
<p>Or, Derek and Cora make it to Iowa, only to meet the werewolf mafia, because Derek's life is the worst.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Radioactive

**Author's Note:**

> This is the second part of the Crossroads series, but it can kind of stand alone, as long as you have seen the finale of s3. But I would love it if you read the first part too :)
> 
> Title and quote (toward the end) from Radioactive by Imagine Dragons because I have decided to ignore the fact that Teen Wolf is still stuck in 2011 (shhhhh).

By the time they reach Iowa, Derek and Cora are sick of each other.  They’ve been switching off driving for twenty-some hours (because Cora does know how to drive, although Derek isn’t sure who taught her) and when they reach Des Moines, Cora says, “If we don’t stop at a motel right now, I am literally going to gnaw you in half and become the super beta I was born to be, so pull the fuck over or get eaten.”

“We only have four more hours to—“

“Derek.  I will rip you in half.  With my teeth.  I will eat your spleen, and I will like it.”  She bares her teeth at him, which are indeed sharp and pointy.  She jabs a finger at the window.  “Look, a Super 8, how convenient.”

He rolls his eyes—seriously, he doesn’t know where her theatrics come from, probably Dad’s side—but he does pull into the parking lot of the sketchy hotel.

“I fucking hate Iowa,” Cora mutters as she uncurls from her seat, every joint popping.

After twelve hours in the car, Derek gave up trying to stop her from swearing.  He knew a hopeless cause when he saw one.

They stroll into the lobby, which is dimly lit and kind of a pukey green color.  Derek carries both their duffle bags and asks the receptionist for a room with two beds.  She bobs her shockingly tall beehive hair at him and hands over two keycards, and they wander away in the direction she waves.

Cora may have had a point about stopping, Derek thinks.  Unlike her, he can’t sleep in a car, and he’s having trouble remembering what number comes before fourteen, and in the end, Cora finds the room and unlocks it.  She pushes him in.

“Go to bed, dumbass,” she says.  “I’m going to take a shower.”

The last thing he remembers is falling asleep on his duffle bag to the sound of running water.

He wakes up eventually because somewhere, his phone is ringing.  He tries to unravel himself from the covers—which he doesn’t remember crawling under—and in the process falls off the bed.  Luckily, this brings him closer to his phone, which is for some reason under the bed.

“Ynghhhh?” he says, immediately regretting answering. 

There’s no answer.

“Sorry,” he rumbles, “morning voice.  Hello?”

“Derek?” a female voice says.

“Mmm,” he says, leaning his face against the mattress, which smells really gross.  Come to think of it, he should probably get off the floor.  He hauls himself back onto the bed and blinks a few times.  “Who is this?”

“This is Allison, Allison Argent?” she says.

He closes his eyes and for a moment considers going back to sleep.  “Okay,” he says.  He opens his eyes and looks around.  No Cora, just a folded up piece of paper on his pillow.  “Allison?” he says.

“Yes.  I’m calling because, the guys, well—nobody knows where you went.”

“Right,” he says, opening the paper.  It reads:

_Dear dumbass,_

_You have been asleep for 18 hours and I got tired of watching you/watching TV/buying shit from the vending machine so I have gone for a run.  If I’m not back by 3:00 PM and you are awake, you should probably call me because I might be dead.  Just kidding, but maybe consider calling me just in case.  You picked a really shitty neighborhood to stay over in._

_Love,_

_C_

“Allison?” he says again, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and frowning.

“Derek, are you okay?” she says.  “Do I—can I—“

“What time is it?” he says.

“It’s, well, it’s two o’clock here, but I don’t know where—“

“I’ll call you back,” he says, hitting the end call button and standing up.  He grabs a bag of jerky out of his duffle and dials Cora.  It goes straight to voicemail.  “Where are you?  You were supposed to be back an hour ago and—I swear to god, if you—never mind, just come back to the hotel, call me when you get here, I’m going looking for you.”  He swallows the jerky basically whole and storms into the hotel lobby.  “Have you seen my sister?” he says to the guy at the desk.  “Long dark hair, brown eyes, pale, kind of skinny?”

“A few hours ago, yes,” the guy says, looking kind of nervous.  Derek must look a little insane.

“Which way did she go?” he says.  The guy points left, so Derek goes left, closing his eyes and letting the filthy smell of the city flow into his sinuses.  It’s faint, but he can smell her, can feel the tug of pack.  It doesn’t feel like she’s hurt or scared, which is good, but there’s still something off.

He calls her again, and it still goes to voicemail.  It isn’t dark yet, but the sky is graying and he knows there are at least three extremely territorial packs in Des Moines who patrol at night.  He doesn’t want to get caught unawares. 

Cora’s scent gets stronger the farther he goes, and he’s almost glad they’re in such a bad part of town, because it means not many people have been on the sidewalks.  He’s so preoccupied with following her scent that he runs full on into a guy so big he rivals the Frankentwins.

“Sorry,” he says, not even looking up.  He tries to edge past him, but suddenly the guy grabs his shoulder in a vice grip and growls, and oh.  “Fuck,” he says.

“Do you have permission to be here?” the guy says.  His voice is so deep it’s almost hard to hear, and his light brown skin makes his white fangs stand out all the more.

Derek sighs.  “Look, I’m leaving as soon as I find my sister, she—“

Then the guy literally crushes his shoulder, and in the second Derek takes to cringe, the guy grabs him around the waist and cracks his spine.  Derek’s legs go numb and the last thing he sees is the guy’s fist coming toward his face.

The next time he wakes up, he’s tied to a chair in the middle of a room.  He swears a little under his breath. 

“What was that?” a voice from behind him says.  “Something about my mother?  Or your mother?”

Derek sighs heavily.  “It’s a figure of speech.”

A man with a belly the size of a prizewinning watermelon walks in front of him.  His olive skin is greasy and his black hair is pulled back in a ponytail and all of a sudden Derek realizes that he has been kidnapped by the actual werewolf mafia, because nothing good ever happens to him.

“Casteglioni?” he says.

“Nothing gets past you,” the guy says with a grin.  He sits down opposite Derek.  “How’re your legs doing?  Got the feeling back yet?  Spine regrown?”

Derek taps his feet in response.

“Perfect,” Casteglioni says.  “Now how about we talk about why there’s a Hale on my turf?  Aren’t you all supposed to be dead?”

“A few of us survived,” Derek says, shrugging.  His shoulder has healed too, so the only thing that’s keeping him from tearing out Casteglioni’s throat is the fact that he’s tied up with confusingly strong chains.  Healing his spine must have sapped his strength pretty well.  “Look, I swear I was about to leave town, it’s just that—“

“We’re still looking for your sister,” Casteglioni says.  “My men will find her.  Word is you built the pack back up, so I think we can probably strike a deal.  We wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

Derek grits his teeth and tries not to let his annoyance show.  The fact that he is literally tied up by the Des Moines werewolf mafia is one of his more ridiculous experiences, because 1. Iowa, and 2. _werewolf mafia._   Of all the genuinely awful things that have happened to him, this doesn’t even come close. 

“If you want money, then you might want to rethink it,” Derek says.  He tries to slump down in his chair a bit, but he’s bound too tightly.  “In case you haven’t heard, I’m the only one over eighteen.”

Casteglioni doesn’t look the least bit bothered.  “Don’t you think I have all the money I could want?”

Luckily, Derek doesn’t have to answer, because at that moment, Cora bursts through a door feet first—dramatic, Derek thinks—and levels an Uzi at Casteglioni.  “Get the fuck away from my brother,” she says, baring her teeth and snarling.  “I’ve got wolfsbane bullets, and I’m not afraid to use them.”

“We need to talk about your theatrics,” Derek says as Casteglioni slowly puts his hands up.

“Whatever,” she says as she walks over slowly to him, keeping the gun trained on Casteglioni the whole time.  She pulls a pair of loppers from the back of her sports bra, which is pretty weird, and uses one hand to chop Derek’s chains, dropping them and the loppers to the floor.  He shakes out his arms and stands up carefully.  “You good?” she says.

“Let’s go.”  He grabs her arm and is about to push her to the door when suddenly, Casteglioni is on them, fully shifted, massive and dark and a mess of red eyes and yellow teeth, raking his claws down Derek’s arm, and then Cora fires the Uzi in his face.  He stumbles back, and she shoots a few more times before letting Derek pull her out of the room.

“Were they really wolfsbane?” he says, jumping over a pile of suited, unconscious werewolves.

“Yeah,” she says, keeping pace with him.  Just because she’s younger and smaller doesn’t mean she isn’t just as fast.  “Yeah, all the guns were loaded with them,” she says, clutching the Uzi to her side.  “I stole some stuff from his goons when I got here.  The rest aren’t dead, so if they get to him in time—but—“

Derek turns to look over his shoulder.  They’ve made it to the street, but he has no idea where they are.  “Take the lead,” he says.  It’s clear, he doesn’t see anybody yet, but they could wake up any second, and the fact that Cora just took out the biggest mob boss in the Midwest means that they’ll be angry.  “Where the hell are we?” he says.

“I know where we are,” she says.  She grabs his hand and drags him into an alley.  “Up.”  They scale a ladder and on the roof, Cora shoves the Uzi into the back of her sports bra.  “Okay.  Our car is ready to go, I got all our stuff, I have the keys, we just have to get to it in time.  They don’t know where we’re headed, so if we can just stay downwind and out of sight, we should be okay.  Did they hurt you?”

He shrugs, looking around at the rundown buildings, scanning for men in suits.  “Few broken bones, a black eye.  I’m fine.”

She stares at him blankly.  “You are such a fucking dumbass, and I hate you, but I’m glad you’re okay.”  She darts in and hugs him quickly.  The Uzi is hard against his shoulder.  “Let’s go.”

They run across rooftops, jumping the gaps.  Cora leads the way, because Derek still has no idea where they are, although things are starting to look familiar.

When they run out of tall buildings to jump, Cora leads him down a rusting ladder into another alley.  “Ready to do something really gross?” she says.

“No,” he says.

“Go roll in that shit,” she says, pointing at a pile of trash.  It’s full of food wrappers, mud, and some other stuff Derek doesn’t want to think too much about.  “They’ve had an hour and a half to learn your smell, but they don’t know mine as well, so if we’re going to hit the street you need to smell like the street.”

“You need to stop watching cop dramas,” he says.

“There was nothing else on while you slept for twenty fucking hours,” she says, grabbing a handful of mud and scrubbing it in his hair.  “Roll.”  And he does, even though it smells horrible, and he’s going to ruin the car— _Peter’s_ car—but it’s actually a pretty good idea.  “Now stay away from me, and run,” she says.

Derek finally knows where they are, knows that at the next intersection he needs to turn right and then the hotel is just a block down.  People stare at them, and he isn’t sure if it’s because he’s covered in filth or because they’re both sprinting full tilt or because Cora very obviously has an Uzi in her sports bra, but he doesn’t let it bother him because they’re getting closer and still nobody is following them.

But of course, because it’s him, the getaway doesn’t go as perfectly as it should.  It turns out he’s lousy at watching behind him, because suddenly he hears the zing of a bullet and then Cora’s gritting her teeth as it hits her shoulder.  She bleeds, a lot, and it turns black and starts smoking, but she doesn’t stop running. 

They careen around the corner, Derek shoving a very angry woman out of his way—she yells after them in Russian—and the next seconds pass in a blur.  Cora pulls the car keys from the front of her sports bra, yells that she’s driving, and the next thing Derek knows she’s throwing him over the hood of the car and leaping into the driver’s seat, jamming the key in and screeching into reverse almost before he can close his own door.

“Holy shit,” he says as she accelerates to sixty in ten seconds flat.

“Fuck, shit, that hurts, Derek, fix it,” she says.  The car starts dinging at her for not wearing a seatbelt.  “There are bullets left, fix it.”  She throws the Uzi at him and keeps driving.

He cracks a bullet with his teeth and lights the powder on the dashboard (Laura’s number one rule, never go anywhere without a lighter), then scoops the powder up and slaps it onto her shoulder.  She screams and flies through a red light.

“Okay, shit, ow, I hate you, you are the worst brother, fuck, motherfucker,” she says, her knuckles going white.

“Open your eyes!” he yells, grabbing the wheel out of her hands.  “Jesus Christ, you’re going to get us killed.  And put on a seat belt.”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out, shuddering.  Her shoulder is smoking vaguely but looks otherwise fine.  The hole closes slowly, leaving behind splashes of red and black blood on her bare shoulder.  “Okay.  Okay.  We’re good.”  She carefully reaches behind her and grabs the seat belt.  “We cannot get pulled over.  I am not dressed, I am covered in blood, you are covered in shit, and we have an Uzi.  Also our car is registered to a dead man.”

“Speaking of Peter, he can never know that I lit wolfsbane on his dash,” Derek says, raising his eyebrows at her.

“Oh, okay, I’ll make sure not to mention that in one of our daily heart to hearts,” she says, gritting her teeth.  “As long as you don’t tell him I bled on the seat.”

“I’ll tell my diary and no one else,” he says, craning his neck around to watch behind them.  The road is clear, not a single black sedan or hairy loper in sight, so he’s pretty sure they’re safe.  “How did you find me?”

“I felt you get hurt,” she says, her eyebrows drawing down.  “So I ran back to the hotel and got us ready to go, in case we needed a quick getaway.  Obviously I am a genius.  And then from there it was easy, I know how you smell, and then you were leaking distress all over the place so it was even easier.”

“I was not leaking distress,” he says.

She merges to the left.  “Whatever you say that helps you sleep at night.”

He glares at the dashboard.  Whatever she says, he was not distressed.  Resigned, yes, because of course that ridiculous shit would happen to him, but at no point was he—well, he lets it go because she did save his ass, after all.  “So, we will definitely be using fake names in Chicago.”

“You think they’ll come after us?”  Her eyes are wide and her face looks tighter than usual.

“You shot Alfonse Casteglioni in the face ten times, so, yeah, probably,” he says.  He finally turns back around and buckles up.  “If he makes it, we’ve pissed off a really dangerous mob boss and alpha.  If he doesn’t, we’ve pissed off his entire pack, and I’m not sure which is worse.  The good news is, I don’t think anybody is following us.  Also we’re going to Chicago, so we can ditch the car in a parking lot until we need it, so they can’t track us that way.”

“And I had Stiles pull a bunch of strings so we both have really convincing fake IDs if it comes down to it,” Cora says.  “So I think we’re good.”

He sighs and wriggles out of his shirt, flinging it out the window the minute they hit the freeway.  “Don’t underestimate the mob.  We’ll have to do more than just fake names to stay safe.”  Then he toes off his boots and strips off his socks, working his way down to just boxers.  He tosses his filthy jeans in the back.  “Now we really can’t get pulled over.”

“You are so weird,” she mutters.

“You were carrying the keys in your bra,” he says.

“Clearly you don’t understand women,” she says.  She grips the wheel at ten and two.  “Okay, plan.  We find a gas station, one of those creepy ones where you have to get a key for the bathroom.  I get the key, you do a sink shower, put on some clothes, we good.”

“Sure.”  He leans his muddy head against the seat.  After having been unconscious in some form for almost twenty four hours, his brain is still in a fog even though the rest of him has already fixed itself.  “This is all your fault,” he says.  “You said you’d be back by three.  I hope it was worth it.”

She purses her lips and stares straight ahead.

“So where were you?” he says.

“Okay, see, there was this guy—“

“Oh my god,” he groans.

“Whatever, I saved you, so shut the fuck up,” she says.  Then she fiddles with the radio and leaves it on something with heavy bass and tight harmony.  “Driver’s choice,” she says.  “If you touch the radio, I’ll bite your hand off.”

He rolls his eyes and then closes them, listening to the music.  It’s not bad, but it isn’t his style.  But he figures, she did save his ass, so he’ll let her have the radio.  “Welcome to the new age indeed,” he says, smiling a little.

“Switch me in a few hours?” Cora says, reaching for his hand.

“Yeah, sounds good.”  He squeezes her fingers and let’s himself drift to sleep. 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you like what you see, come check me out on tumblr! I'm sixchord over there too. Sometimes I post prompt fics and snippets of stuff I'm working on, besides general Teen Wolf madness :)


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